Category Archives: The Ancestors’ Breath

I got an email today from a man in Colorado. He was writing to tell me that he and his son had somehow just discovered Andromeda, and that they had both been moved by the actions and intentions of the character, Tyr. It’s always touching to get such attention so long after the fact. It compelled me to throw these writings up here one more time. There are still other places you can see them, but they have endured, for some, like the character, and I thought they should have a permanent home.These “journal entries” from the perspective of the character, Tyr, were written as an exercise meant to hopefully provide dimension to a character who was far more complex in my mind than he was for the exigencies of production. It’s far easier to produce content about facile characters, but they are equally that much less interesting or fun to play. I cannot speak for the viewership, but my sense was that such characters are never particularly interesting to watch either… I had endeavored, in The Ancestors’ Breath, to explore the depth of the character’s actions and intentions as informed by his back story; his heritage, his changing life circumstance, and a whole lot of stuff that I just simply made up regarding how I assumed such a species (genetically engineered super-human) would most realistically behave. They were a help to me, creating psychology and sensibility where, for the sake of the camera, there were only general ideas.

For the fans of the character, I suppose that these writings amounted to little more than fan fiction from the horse’s mouth. And that’s fine… Who better, in fact, to write it?

For any others, those who remain, or those who are newly interested, here, in eight separate posts, are all eight entries to The Ancestor’s Breath: Reflections and Reminiscences of Barbarossa’s Son. Read More →

My father was quite fond of reading and quoting a Nietzschean supremacist poet who called himself King Darius, or “The King”. He wrote, “Glorious son, go up from the nightside and look down on us. / Where the lights shine brightest, there! There are we. / Where darkness alone resides, yet there are peoples whose one resource is wishing. / Go up because you can. / It will remind you of who you are. / And of who you shall not ever be again.” King Darius’ writings reflected upon Nietzschean world scenarios that existed ten to twelve generations prior to his words ever reaching my father’s eyes. Subjugation of inferiors, or “primitives” as is perhaps the more accurate term, was commonplace, and necessary to ensure economic development. His works enjoyed a resurgence of popularity during my childhood among Nietzschean slavers and those who refused to either denounce or condone their practices. My father was one of the latter. Read More →

“Making love”… While no Nietzschean ever tends to use that Human euphemism, my grandfather, Temujin II, would say that no man is to be trusted who doesn’t subsist on a steady diet of sex and violence as well. Of course, from a Nietzschean perspective, no man is to be trusted regardless, but why waste a perfectly valid turn of phrase for the sake of a technicality? My grandfather, whom I admired, was a bit of a Dragonian lunatic, if I may use it as a term of endearment; a less extreme incarnation of his old namesake, Temujin I. Which is to say that a greater than average portion of his adult life was spent fighting and procreating; for Nietzscheans, the most inevitable if not the most pragmatic of life’s endeavors. And so, to him, to most of us, it has never made sense to create language around them meant, it seems, only to somehow civilize their primal nature. The Human will ceaselessly put forth the proposition that sex and violence are not inextricably linked, and, in fact, they may not be for him because he kills and copulates for many various and sundry odd reasons that the Nietzschean, generally speaking, does not. Read More →

(Because the Commonwealth is human-centric, and everything is measured in Earth years. Silly, yes?)

If now is a time that is forever “after this last” and “before that next thing,” then the now, or series of nows, that comprised the six months after I had, by what means I don’t really know, delivered myself from indenture to a ring of flash and weapons traders, and before anyone had ever offered me a fee to take a life, were peaceful. The verbal contract with the traders, a colorful but pernicious cast of characters who called themselves The Consortium, dictated that I remain in their employ for another full year. If I had not been bored, restless, at odds with their methods, undercompensated, and underappreciated …well…I am still. Suffice it, however, to say that if I had not been seventeen, which is to say had I been the mature and prophetic sage that I am today, I probably would have stayed. A funny thing, the propriety of thieves who will cite you your obligation to the letter of your contract with the gravest decorum while robbing everyone blind and fatting themselves on the fruits of your labor. Funny too are a young man’s impulses. Perhaps afraid that, once finding me gone, they would be even angrier with me to realize as well that I had run with some sizable portion of their contraband and thus be compelled to a more fervent pursuit, I instead took flight with nothing. I was to learn that, despite having left them with all that was “theirs” except for my humble self, my having broken my scoundrel’s oath and bolted at all gave them umbrage enough to pursue me to exhaustion, on sheer principle I suppose. It was a decision on my part that I can’t even label as juvenile, for it was one that no other Nietzschean male over the age of nine, to my knowledge, would ever have made. Read More →

I can wander the decks of the Andromeda Ascendant for days without end and never travel the same stretch of corridor twice. In her depths, further than any short sojourn from command, are endless dark and dormant chambers where no one has stood for over three hundred years. Onboard this ship, as I imagine it goes in the military, a man’s quarters are anything but inviolate. Anyone can find me in mine, and all too often do. Privacy is provided only by journeying too deep into Andromeda’s guts for anyone to care to come and retrieve me if I fail to answer the com. Of course, there really is no hiding from the ship herself. And she tends to concern herself a bit beyond reason with the Nietzschean’s whereabouts, I think. But then, I imagine I would keep an eye on me if I were she. I am a wanderer by nature it seems. And to explore these empty decks long enough would probably offer up an intimate knowledge of things best left unbeknownst to one of questionable intent. Read More →

The physicist, Albert Einstein uncountable eons ago said this: “A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Merely by virtue of having, through no force of mine own will, been born in the age that I was, I could quite readily teach that brilliant old sage many a thing that would stand his primitive quantum theory on its ear and fry the synapses in his pre-historic brain. But yet I could not improve upon this one simple set of thoughts. Read More →